Another day another dollar. Happy (belated) Fourth of July to all of my American readers. Happy July in general to the rest of you. Happy Cancer season to those who observe.
Aside from the July-ness of it all, the start of the month—any month—can mean only one thing around here. A new episode of Something We Read, the podcast that’s taking over the world one listener at a time, has arrived. Created with love and packaged up just for you.
Listen to it here:
Or here, whatever floats your boat:
Yes, the book this month was Speedboat by Renata Adler, which was nothing short of a rollick. I want to keep it short because much of what I wanted to say about this novel was said (by me, and sometimes by Kathryn) on the podcast. And I want you to listen! But…
Of course, I also can’t help but expound a little bit. It is I.
And the I is what I want to talk about! The I of this book. Jen Fain, our disillusioned but still curious, skeptical, but perpetually along for the ride, sharp-as-a-tack narrator. Because this is a book without a real plot. No action to follow for longer than a page or two. Maybe to be picked back up several pages later, then dropped entirely, never to be mentioned again.
She is revealed to us in pieces, and the key to my reading experience was the revelation that it was her I was supposed to be following. Her I was supposed to discover. She was the big reveal! Not some through-line, not the men that she introduces out of no where—who she’ll kind of live with for a time, before Joe is unceremoniously replaced by Alan on the page and you almost forget to realize that she’s talking about someone else. I don’t know if those are the right names, I can’t recall.
I’m being a little dramatic—a couple of the men do have distinguishable traits of course, but I hone in on that example because if there’s one thing I’m apt to try to trace in a story, it’s the romance. But in this story, that’s not the right thing to try to trace. Nor is any other thing. Not even what Jen is doing for work or who her friends are or the drama between the tenants in her apartment building, though it was fun to try with that one. The thing to trace is the outline of her.
She’s funny and deadly serious. She’s certain and uncertain. She finds herself in the darnedest of situations, though as she asserts in one of the passages I read on the podcast, no place she ends up is any “odder” than any other. She’s a keen observationalist and she’s sharing her takes with you, unselfconsciously and also unpretentiously.
Aside from Jen, or perhaps embodied in her, another that I found fascinating about the novel was the “tumultuous times” element of it all. We’re in the early 1970’s—described in the afterword of my edition as the hangover of the 1960’s. I’m not a historian, but ff the top of my head: Cold War, Vietnam War, Watergate, subsequent Impeachment of Richard Nixon.
A disillusioned, discontented time, much like, perhaps, the time we are currently living in. If we aren’t living in a time like that, we are at the very least being told all the time that we are. It must be true in some way, because there was so much in Jen’s voice—Adler’s creation—that spoke to the present moment.
I find that I keep wanting to caveat my observations around this and I don’t know why. A distaste for generalization I guess. And I think Jen rejects generalization. Certainly rejects catastrophization—the lumping in of it all. She may be skeptical, disturbed, untethered, but she doesn’t panic. Or if she does, which the afterword interestingly claims she does, her panic pales in comparison with what feels like the loud and forceful panic of our day.
Things may be going grievously wrong in a hundred thousand different ways, but they have in the past as well and will continue to forevermore. We are funny little creatures, determined to keep on living.
Early on in the novel, I think the point (for lack of a better phrase) of this book is neatly summed up. It’s the one I choose for myself—nestled in there unobtrusively: a voice. Jen’s voice. Named, and moved on from in order to make room for other points, which is of course, also the point.
What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it’s who’s at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.